The Core Collective Workbook:
Building Collective Resilience By Cultivating Core Values
Type: Content / zine
Category: Creative project
For more inclusive, resilient communities, we must start with the resilience of the individual - in context. Our core values dictate our way of being, both consciously and subconsciously, but they are never solely our own. Our understanding of the world is informed and reformed by the actions we take, spaces we inhabit, and company we keep. Getting clear on our own values allows us to act with intention, and see ourselves in relation to others.
Managers, therapists, and community leaders alike emphasize core values as means for community building. This process starts by putting words to what matters to us individually in order to reflect on behaviors that matter to us collectively. Writer-scholar Brené Brown offers a clear, simple method for identifying core values. Adapted from Brown’s work, my workbook zine encourages individuals to reflect on their core values and how their communities inform those values.
By getting clear on our values we can resist the neoliberal urge to stay separate, siloed, and silent. System resilience relies on the idea that the strength of the individual is directly related to the strength of the community. Developing and standardizing core values is a vital tool for both individual and collective resilience.
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Managers, therapists, and community leaders alike emphasize core values as means for community building. This process starts by putting words to what matters to us individually in order to reflect on behaviors that matter to us collectively. Writer-scholar Brené Brown offers a clear, simple method for identifying core values. Adapted from Brown’s work, my workbook zine encourages individuals to reflect on their core values and how their communities inform those values.
By getting clear on our values we can resist the neoliberal urge to stay separate, siloed, and silent. System resilience relies on the idea that the strength of the individual is directly related to the strength of the community. Developing and standardizing core values is a vital tool for both individual and collective resilience.
Background
As a worker and a manager, I observe the struggle in myself that I identify in others: the struggle to see a new version of community that does not pit one against the other; that, in fact, cooperation, trust, and reliance on others does not do the individual a disservice - it radically improves each one of us. As a communicator and a designer, I am intimate with the power of narrative and belonging. My philosophy and strategy is to create narratives that immerse individuals in irresistible new modes of being, emphasizing their individual agency while demonstrating their collective power.
Existing Methods
Many existing methods of employee engagement focus on benefits, advancement, and meaningful purpose. Employee engagement generally leads to a stronger organization that values its employees, customers, and products. Actively working on engagement in any organization will improve collaboration, innovation and resilience.
Design Inspiration
Zines—via content and form—are uniquely positioned for self-reflection, idea-generation and community-building. Zines intimately speak to the weight and frivolity of life as well as intensively grapple with relationships and ways of living. The DIY ethos and aesthetics of zines offer a tangible, anti-mainstream in-road for connecting individuals to themselves and each other beyond capitalist isolation.